Epic of Gilgamesh (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK thank you for downloading this episode of in our time but news about in our time and for recommendations about our archive please follow us on twitter at BBC in our time I hope you enjoyed the programmes hello he who saw the deep that's a quotation the first words of the epic of gilgamesh said to be the first great masterpiece of literature a perm with roots more than four thousand years old in Mesopotamia modern-day Iraq and rediscovered in the 19th century it tells of Gilgamesh king of Uruk who with his best friend his friend inky do fights a giant and kills the bull of heaven and alone travels across the waters of death to meet the one man who survived the great flood in the vain hope of learning from him how to live forever in his adventure Gilgamesh becomes a wiser man and a better king and learns to accept his mortality we've much but not all of the ancient texts from clay tablets gathered near Mosul and it's hope more discoveries will continue to fill the gaps with me to discuss the epic of gilgamesh our Andrew George professor a Babylonian at Searcy University of London Frances Reynolds unit a fellow in Surrey ology at the Oriental Institute University Oxford and fellow of San Bennett's Hall and Martin Worthington lecturer in a cellar ology at the University of Cambridge Andrew George where do we look for for the origins of the Gilgamesh poem well we don't know much about the origins of the poem the first thing we know about the poem is is that it was written down on clay tablets in the cuneiform script in the very first centuries of the second Lenon BC that's nearly four thousand years ago but we can judge I think from the style of the poem from its use of features of oral poetry or epic poetry in particular that it was once I think a poem that was told by minstrels told by by bards son perhaps orally before it became written down so 4,000 is the lower marker it was a few hundred years maybe a thousand or so years before then but we don't know but that's an educated guess we just don't know but that as he says educated guess but what we do find this is that because the material on which the epoch is written play tablets in the cuneiform script is very durable then we find that we've got pieces of this poem from many centuries from that time about the 19th century BC right down to 100 BC so we can observe the evolution and development of the poem across an enormous timespan which is extremely exciting you have a view about who wrote this poem you every you thought that was a person it wasn't an amalgam of folktales and this that and the other can you develop that well I think that both those that those positions are in some way correct that certainly it seems to me that the the poem suggests itself that it is the work of a single creative genius but on the other hand answers not how do you arrive at that conclusion because it has the integrity of of mood and thought behind it it seems to me that it must be the work of one man but on the other hand the creation of literature in ancient Mesopotamia as elsewhere traditionally depends upon using the given material and a lot of folklore existed I think in actually Mesopotamia which we don't know of but which is used by the poet of Gilgamesh in constructing this this great poem so it was first written down as far as in and let us say 4000 years ago and then you think about a thousand years later another person got hold of it and changed it quite quite a lot that seems to be the case the the poem that we have in the oldest fragments is as it seems a very different mood from the poem that we is much better preserved from a thousand years later and the Babylonians themselves gave us the name of the poet a name that seems to be younger than the oldest version of the poem so it seems that the mood changes from a poet sorry important about about the glory of an epic hero the glory of the greatest hero and king of old to one that is essentially a meditation upon the facts of life and particularly on death this it seems to me is than in an intervention in the poem which is very considerable changes it completely and then I would think that this is also the work of an individual how did the text reach us the text reaches us on on clay tablets as I've said the these clay tablets have come to light since the 1850s generally in their tens of thousands but the first great discovery in 1850 resulted in in two to twenty thousand gray tablets with cuneiform script on them being sent back to the British Museum and there they sat for about fifteen years until in 1866 the museum authority is appointed a young man to sort them and this was George Smith and by a ten-year eleven by ten years after that a period during which cuneiform script was properly deciphered the languages in which which which used the script were began to be properly studied and understood he was able ten years after beginning his work to give a fair translation of the preserved parts of the epic as it was then known not necessarily in the right order and that was the basis of your translation which has been widely praised as been quite wonderful and my must say bread it reads beautifully and fluidly as if it were fragments from a sort of wasteland really what's been happening since George Smith is that further discoveries of tablets and occurred and this is going on we are essentially pioneers in a serie ology recovering the world's oldest literature is not just Gilgamesh but many other compositions this is a work that continues I've been the latest person to have had the privilege in bringing together the texts about Gilgamesh but it's work that must continue but our problem is is that I see reality is not very well financed and always vulnerable to cuts so we're not sure if this this this field has a future we desperately hope that it has well Ryan Reynolds we'll wait and see for that one can you summarize the plot oh yes yes Andrew said it is an amazing story we start off with a very poetic prologue and a hymn when the narrative gets going we have Gilgamesh as a king in Iraq who's abusing his power it's a period of tyranny the city can't function as it should as a result there's an outcry he's preoccupying the people particularly the young in marshal exercises he's abusing his rights and in response the mother goddess actually creates a wild man Enkidu from clay to be a match to Gilgamesh and the idea is that this will therefore absorb his energies his aggression top with the herds isn't he he's grass he arrives at the waterhole with the herds very much exactly which is a fascinating idea of the king misbehaving in the city in the wild man with the gazelles obviously then they need to meet and the bridging device there is that a prostitute from the temple of the city of Oracle we have to remember that the prostitute here is a high-status celtic prostitute right in the heart of the city is sent out to trap Enkidu he is then meets Gilgamesh the entrapment I mean it's we're talking about he comes she seduces him it's very important that he is humanized through contact with the woman which takes places we're here unabashedly and unashamedly for seven days and seven nights absolutely and the end is humanized absolutely indeed and also he's not as not as much the animal he was is more of a human because of this particular sort of contact exactly so long yes it's an interesting fact that he then can't live with the gazelles anymore but he has intelligence and wisdom to connect with humans so he then sets off for the city and enemy to kill commercially challenging them to a battle and it's it's a sort of draw then they become very very close friends indeed and in a sense the city isn't too big it isn't big enough for the two of them they then set off to the cedar forest where they fight the Guardian an ogre Humbaba and he is killed after this victory this is a great monster we mustn't underestimate that's retold if he rustles around the floor of the forest can heard from one end of the forest to the other so they it's a great big epic monster that they face absolutely told all the way along you mustn't do this yes quite right so the slaying of Humbaba is indeed an act of hubris it's an offense to the gods and of course Gilgamesh himself is this source of semi-human semi-divine figure he's a giant and Kaddu matches him they effectively meet another King in the cedar forest in Humbaba then after that encounter and victory they then carry on and when Gilgamesh is washing after the battle the goddess Ishtar sees them and desires him and proposes marriage we have a wonderful inversion then at the classical proposal of marriage from a man to a woman with the goddess proposing marriage to Gilgamesh however each Tower is the goddess of sex and violence a proposal from her is an extremely dangerous matter Gilgamesh rejects her previous lovers have come to a very indeed Gaia and Wyndham if one looks at her dating history one there's nothing courage however he's extremely rude in his rejection she's furious and calls on her father the sky got a new to bring the bull of heaven down to kill Gilgamesh but the heroes prevail and there is another slaughter and another act of hubris and then too big so to Russia of it but but but to three big thing one big thing that happened is that that in ki do in dreams discovers he's going to die and does die and causes great humanism you use that word great grief to Commission the other elements itself in the path of the Sun to find the man who survived the flood and discover the secret of immortal life and gets and the man who gives him one test this would be gonna beat him mortal eyes you've got to beat sleep try not to sleep he immediately falls asleep for seven days and if he can't sleep then you can't beat death yes absolutely it's the kind of humiliation that he can't even manage to conquer sleep and how would you say ends and it comes back and what is the ending of this the ending is that Gilgamesh travels back to ORAC with the ferryman who enabled him to cross the waters of death and reach the floods of and when he reaches his city he is able to reach a reconciliation that while every mortal individual will die nonetheless the human race is eternal and he can see the city as an expression of humanity and of future generations so it's the classic story of a journey that ends where it's begun but with different perception and he has built this wall on that wall warning the city keeping the city going is his real legacy if one is thinking of a concrete legacy yes yes well thank you very much sorry just about missed we missed the plant of rejuvenation which was stolen while he had a baby but we've got to move on now to Martin Worthington we speak about it as a perm did it come down to us as a perm well the definition of poetry is highly controversial even today in the particular case of Babylonia we're very lucky because when they write things which we call poems they lay them out in poetic lines so that each line is a complete clause or sentence so it's think technically complete that's one indicator that this isn't just unvarnished prose also on what we call Babylonian poems have verses which are normally constructed around three or four nuggets of meaning meaning one principle word and this makes them tremendously economical if you take a verse a Babylonian Persian translated into English you often find a number of words doubles so um for example if we take a pebble University says Sinan edema a leaf of Peru that's a mere four words but in English it becomes an ax was lying there and people were gathering round it and these are words you might not actually notice as a reader of an English poem because they're not terribly important but in the Babylonian they're not there to clutter you and so Babylonian verses unfold one after the other in a sort of poetic March of words with a great power they don't have a rhyme in the way that we might expect from a poem and they don't really have rhythm in the sense of dum dee-dum dee-dum dee-dum dee-dum dee-dum dee-dum in the way that English poems do but at the same time there's a great force in the words and there are often lots of subtle little tricks um which are built-in so for example in the story which is part of the flood story in the flood story which is part of the Gilgamesh poem um we have this line where the hero of the flood is told to destroy his house and he's also told it told to spurn riches so it goes mush sheer mesh um now that verbal form Monsieur wouldn't normally have an M so if you're a second year Acadian student at one of our universities or indeed any other university and you're sitting there scratching your head saying why on earth is the M there I wouldn't expect it to be there you know we could sort of be there archaically but what's it there for but then you look at the next word it's mush sheer mesh Rama and because Akkadian like Arabic like Hebrew like all Semitic languages is above all interested in consonants you suddenly see that mushiya abandon and measure our wealth are put side by side so they look like they have the same consonants much so they've gone out of their way to sort of reinvent an old consonant to take it somewhere it isn't really needed for the sake of achieving this play on the words to roots so there are lots of details of verbal artistry in the story of Gilgamesh so I think that by any definition we're more than comfortable in calling it a poem even if the Babylonians themselves don't seem to have talked about poems in the way that the Western tradition does one of the things is very striking about this in announcer and in Andrews translation is repetitions occur again and again and again for instance calling on the winds the north wind east wind the West green hurricanes tornadoes and how many leagues they walk when they stop to eat these are repeated again and again is that is that because of the West translation came to you or is it because of the way the poem was intended to be the petition is a very interesting feature of a Mesopotamian poetry at large it already starts in Sumeria and it carries through to Babylonian um and it can take many forms you can have the repetition of an entire passage so ten lines appear here and then they appear later you can have repetition within a line or you could for example have a string of lines that start with the same word and at different times different poets use all of these strands and there's something that we're not really used to we can speculate about why it is and you can construct different models which are based on your literary sympathies one model might be it reminds people what's happening um the other idea might be if you're telling the story out orally you can have the same passage told with different tones of voice so that words acquire different resonances um we could talk a long time repetition is a striking feature of Mesopotamian literature you can't call to mind the great calling up of the winds can you in in the dark in the language it's a big ask isn't it we could get Andrews book out but I didn't like to try it off the top of my head the curse of wind and tornadoes and hurricanes no that's fine fair enough thank you very much Andrew can you tell us about a bit about Gilgamesh what qualities to see how what is he like at the start of the firm it's been hinted at by Fran but barely being talked about boyfriend can we develop it he starts out as a king and a bad king and this ties in with political thought in ancient Mesopotamia which if your king is going to exercise power properly and you know in everyone's advantage then the king must be counseled but our problem with Gilgamesh this great giant hero living in a rocky said whose mother is a goddess is that he's superhuman he doesn't have a counselor and therefore the story has to bring a counselor to him and that's one of inky dudes jobs to make him a counselor but later on in the poem we discovered that the kingship of Gilgamesh is not really at issue anymore then he becomes a just one of us and under the reason why this poem I think resonates for us is because we can identify with his human struggle as a man but he is it unusual you tell me to have a perm of such prominence and at the time and since which criticizes the court which criticizes the king from the beginning I mean he has the right of the first night with all brides and so on he takes sons away from their father he's seriously described as a as a terrible tyrant it's unusual is it or is it unique but it's certainly not unique I think in societies where we've lived under autocratic government then as well as now the literature has a special role to play in in being subversive in being critical of power speaking truth under power but in such a way that power doesn't quite realize it Gilgamesh certainly does that ancient literary compositions from Mesopotamia that bring the same critical analysis to power from Reynolds we've come to include this this man who was taken from the herd taken from a humanized by and by shamans and so on and brought it and he goes what Wade he's he seems to be a complement of Gilgamesh how is he can you describe that yes I think that operates on many levels on one level they complement one another physically and that we have wonderful descriptions of both Gilgamesh and Enkidu their supreme physical beauty their stature they also compliment one another in a sense of their abilities their aggression their energy so they effectively Gilgamesh for the first time finds a peer and somebody with whom he can travel with whom he can have these adventures so I think there's a very nice physical parallel when they first go to the Shepherd's camp when they're on when shamhat and Enkidu are on their way back to auric the Shepherd's say to ankud oh you look so like Gilgamesh you know this is extraordinary so I think there's a meeting on a lot of levels between those two and the word love between them is used quite regularly in the poem isn't it it is indeed you interpret that well obviously this has been a matter of much debate what the nature of the relationship actually was between Gilgamesh and Enkidu and this obviously also respects reflects the responses to the poem of the readers of the time but it seems clear that as well as a very close friendship there was also a sexual relationship between them so the relation ship was also won on that that level as well as one of being companions because when you do die the the grief of guilt commercially is unbounded isn't it really both won't have been buried for days he mostest funeral that there's ever no he is devastated and of course that then moves the action forward into the second part of the epic can we develop that martin this idea of relationship between the two because i mentioned the word love because it's in hundreds translation several times they hold hands they walk through things and so on but that you might emmanuel a great monsters what else what other parts of a relationship very important for us to know but one of the wonderful things about Mesopotamian literature is that it often does things that aren't visible on the surface so you have to look very carefully to see what messages are nestling between those spoken words so for example um Gilgamesh actually has dreams which prefigure Enkidu's arrival and in the first dream he sees an axe and in the second dream as well in the first dream he says a meat-eor and in the second dream he sees an axe now people have sought to interpret these two dreams in terms of linguistic puns so the word for axe sounds vaguely like the word for a male Celtic prostitute and so on and so forth and so in some sense these two dreams prefigure the sexual relationship between the two but I mean it all becomes very unwieldy doesn't it I mean you know you have these dreams about totally random objects just for the sake of introducing some sort of wordplay and the words barely exist in the first place so there's another way of looking at it which is to say Enkidu is created by the gods from a pinch of clay and then he's humanized by shamhat in the six days and seven nights he were talking about earlier so in the first three he meant we have a meat-eor I a raw material that comes down from heaven and in the secondary we have an axe ie a humanized artifact made out of the raw material from the first dream and so you can interpret these two dreams as a tacit prefiguration of Enkidu's transformation and this would also explain why in these dreams there's no mention of the fact that Enkidu starts as a wild creature and so on and so forth because it's all there implicit um so this is something the story does a lot of and there's a very nice bit with the axe because we've said that in the in the second dream Enkidu is symbolized by an axe and indeed this is a theme that's picked up in the poem so Enkidu is going to be Gilda Misha's axe because he's the friend at his side he protects him he's the machete easily he's the savior of his companion and so on and so forth and actually so long as Enkidu is act Gilgamesh aside or in front of amuse or in front of him very good mother says go in front of him so the front one gets the hit and my son is going to walk behind you the implication is clear at his side or in front of him Gilgamesh doesn't have an x1 think you do is dead suddenly Gilgamesh has an axe the weapon in his hand and of course this is probably because so long as Gilgamesh was alive the axe was symbolically present in the form of thank you doing so Gilgamesh didn't need one but once Enkidu is gone then we need a replacement for the loss think you do and so there are all these little games being played about the nature of their relationship which have to be rustled out and I'm sure there are many more that we still have to rustle angry George and given much kills the guardian of the cedar forest can you tell us why the cedar forest is so important and how they managed to kill this alarming monster and annoy the gods for killing one of their best monsters hmm the cedar forests in Mesopotamia is the name given to a remote forest far away in the east or the west whence kings and rulers got timber for big building products projects there was no timber in ancient Mesopotamia it had to be brought in imported from the mountains so the cedar forest is a well-known term in ancient Mesopotamia but the poet of Gilgamesh visualizes it somewhat differently from how one would expect and in fact only recently in this new manuscript has come to light which plugs a gap in the story and describes the cedar forest to us it's actually a jungle it's a jungle filled with the shrieks of birds the cacophony of insects and and monkey monkeys yelling in the trees all entertaining The Guardian Humbaba who lives in the like a king surrounded by his musicians and that the forest itself is used in poem to make a particular particular point in Gilgamesh Enkidu and dinky to go there with the intent of killing whom barber and chopping down his trees this is what they do but the poet brings a sort of ambivalence into this episode which might be construed to be heroic and glorious but in fact the heroes realized that what they're doing is against the will of the gods and indeed the new piece of tablet tells us at the end after Enkidu and Gilgamesh have chopped down the trees the inca do looks back and he says my friend we've created this wasteland what shall we tell the gods when we get back home so there's awareness there that man lives in an environment and he lifts a he can destroy and damage that environment and that is wrong that is wrongful the idea there in this episode is also that to invade someone else's country and kill the king and destroy their resources or pillage the resources and take them back to home this is also somehow morally wrong so the poet here he's again critical of power do we have enough detail the way in which they kill this great monster hawawa mother depending on which one you use there's not enough detail to be convincing about it or on that piece is missing there which would have been illuminated as a rather more there are still gaps in the story as elsewhere in the story we've only got about two-thirds of this epic poem but we know that the monster whom barber was immobilized by the winds and then he pleaded for his life Enkidu and Gilgamesh in the end tire of his pleading and angry - and Gilgamesh both cut him cut his throat and extra-- rather gore Allah extract his heart and lungs an interesting thing they also do is they cut off his teeth which is some reflection of of who our being elephantine in some way and another reference to the trade in raw materials that that sangman Kings indulged in then we have this scene Fran Reynolds were Ishtar the goddess sees Gilgamesh and proposes very powerfully that she wants to marry him or take him whichever word you wish to use both a preview and he resists can you tell us about that scene yes this is one of the critical scenes in the epic and it's an interesting encounter in that first of all we have Gilgamesh in a sense being very vulnerable he's just won this great victory over Humbaba Sandra's been describing and he's washing after the battle and we often find that there will be an event when heroes are kind of relaxed they're not expecting something to happen and because of the display of his body Ishtar sees him and as you say there is this strong desire being a goddess of love and war one might also say sex and violence she's extremely direct she's very aggressive and so she proposes to him promising him wealth and power but as we mentioned earlier she does have this very let's say dis encouraging dating history of this terrible fate that's met by all her previous lovers so Gilgamesh refuses he doesn't want to be the latest in the list of casualties and she takes she tries to take a revenge indeed she's not used to not getting what she wants you know ii actually thought Ishtar is is a very dangerous strategy so she calls down from her father the sky god this great monster the bull of heaven to kill Gilgamesh and to destroy auric and this is a ferocious animal you know it's its breath with as vegetation hits open up in the earth it can destroy anything that's in its path that's Gilgamesh and Enkidu do prevail and there's a very nice coda seal to that where Ishtar so angry she goes up on the ramparts of Erik and is that she sort of abusing the heroes so Enkidu tears off the haunt of the ball behind leg and actually throws it at Ishtar and this is part of the etiology for the constellation the bull of heaven which is our Taurus and how it appears in the sky to have one leg missing [Laughter] Martin Martin Worthington how does in the death of inka do affect Gilgamesh and and and the course of the poem well at the start of what we call tablets meaning chapter eight Enkidu's dead and Gilgamesh pronounces a funeral elegy for him and it begins as you might expect Oh Enkidu now this is very surprising because if you look carefully Gilgamesh has so far never actually spoken the named Enkidu who as far as I know there are gaps in there are gaps might have done in might have done it again so it's also interesting that in detects we have Enkidu has never spoken the name Gilgamesh whereas other characters have used the people's names and the two chaps have used other people's names so it rather looks as if there was some sort of convention which for reasons we don't want to understand acting as a constraint on how they called each other and as soon as Enkidu dies this constraint is lifted there's a paradigm shift is transformative and so suddenly the name is preserved and of course this makes sense because what do we put on our tombstones you know the name is the one thing that's going to preserve you forever and so the first thing that killed the mesh does is he preserves Enkidu's name now we know from an earlier version of the story that the Gilgamesh is very reluctant to give thank you up for burial for a long time add the total income in official until a worm drops from his nose and then finally he realizes okay it's time to move on and then he starts thinking about himself and of course his friend having died means oh dear am I going to die too well the one person who can give me advice on that is the one man who became mortal the flood hero so let's go and find him ensue Gilgamesh embarks on this quest to find a flood hero but along the way he becomes a bit like Inca do himself um he starts roaming the wild he wears lion skins but in fact this is something that God shamash the Sun God had foretold to Inca do on his deathbed saying after you die Gilgamesh will start implicitly behaving like you and this seems to be some comfort to the dying Enkidu and these journeys he takes a massive journeys described as enormous journeys in terms of distances time taken following the path of the Sun or whatever just going up waters of death that's under George he goes in search of ruta nappy sh t the man the one man who survived the great deluge and then we have a story within a story in a way could you tell us about that how did he survive yes the story of Luton officially is is found elsewhere in Babylonian literature but the poet of Gilgamesh has used it as a story within a story and for a very good reason which will give you in a moment that tunafish T is asked by Gilgamesh how is it that you became immortal and he tells the story of how a long time ago the gods had sent a great flood but he had been told in advance to prepare a boat and bring into it all the sea the seed of all living things and his family and kith and kin and thus to survive the deluge the urge came eternity and his family and seed of all living things were preserved in the boat floating on the water and there's a very moving bit here where Luton officially describes how when the rain ceased and things had gone quiet he opened a hatch and looked out and he could see only water and then he reflects on him on his position on what has happened he sees that all men of death died and he says o Khatami's SMAW etosha baba ki le Doody appear ill academia i knelt me down and sat there weeping and over the sides of my cheeks the tears did flow so and when I read this with my students many students say they actually moved by the original Babylonian here which is interesting in a poem that's four thousand years old but the purpose of the poet has other emotional parts as well but the purpose of the flood story then is to tell Gilgamesh look guten Appetit I eat and I pitched he became immortal through a one-off event long time ago in history it's not going to happen to you there is no secret there is nothing I can tell you more than that except the do tuna fish tea does have more to say which is that he teaches Gilgamesh about life and about death he teaches Gilgamesh that life is something the gods have given to mankind but for each individual there like a mayfly on the river they're there for a moment and then they die but the human race symbolized by the family recreates itself cyclically so that the human race is immortal but the individual is his mortal the individual must die and I think we must remember that Babylonia was probably a society a lot more like many Asian societies than European ones which privileged the individual in many Asian societies its society the community that's privileged and the individual has to find his way his path in the community and to the community's advantage there's something there in the poem of that too and then he as a conversation he gives him a plant which would rejuvenate him the snake steals the plant sheds the skin on the way in to back into the bush he gets back as we've said out it gets back to oracle fern rules what impact did the deluge story have on the 19th century 90 century scholars and people anybody know about it Oh Christians and Jews know about Noah it was instantly compared with all what happened well I mean as you can imagine it was an extremely high impact when George Smith in British Museum first deciphered the flood story in 1872 I mean the shock on him was extraordinary we have this accounts about how he was in the British Museum that undressed and ran about the room this may have just been when he discovered the story of the deluge exactly show anybody else though at the time and we have we have to note that this may have been slight early Victorian PR possibly just loosened his collar stick with the original but as you can appreciate discovering this flood story which nobody would have predicated and came from sources much older than any known sources of the Bible was extremely high impact this went beyond the limited world of scholarship this became a matter of national discussion involving prime ministers heads of state it was internationally discussed and of course for some people it was seen as a threat the question was was it something that somehow undermined the Bible or indeed was it something that supported the Bible could it be seen as as you know sort of supporting the belief in the Bible as a literal text so it was very controversial this went way beyond the realms of just a scholarly matter Jesus College is the argument still doesn't like would still continue Martin Worthington between NOAA and the the survivor in Commission the occupy grandpa who came first Oh in a sense it's an argument which will go on forever and can never be resolved and I think there are very I think ultimately you find a Serio lodgest saying that Gilgamesh comes first and you'll find some old testement scholars saying that Andrew yeah I'm just going for that I can sorry to interrupt I was just going to add simply that the evidence of archaeology is clearly that these tablets on which the flood story survives in Mesopotamia date back 4,000 years from now there's nothing that suggests that the story in Genesis of Noah dates back anything like that long so in terms of precedence the Mesopotamian story both has an independent story and probably also in Gilgamesh is rather older considerably older than the story in Genesis is the idea of sikhi of a man a human being seeking immortality is that a given did it happen before Gilgamesh whatever we had before Gilgamesh or does he introduce that idea I think that is a new idea and what's very interesting is we don't really know how close he came to it if you ask Gilgamesh he'll probably tell you oh I was so close you know I had this plant it would have given me youth or eternal life or something of a damn snake bore it off and Here I am without it but actually um he had to go and get that plant down in the subterranean waters call the app su which are the realm of the god air who's the trickiest of Mesopotamian gods so it's quite possible that when you attend officially the flood hero said go and find the plan to down in the app soo he knew that Al would take care of the matter and arrange things so that they pan out and of course it's in a pool of fresh water that Gilgamesh loses the plant again fresh water is air so it's quite possible that we have the hand of air in gold meshes ultimate failure we've touched on that but I'd like to develop it as we come towards the end of the program under it me how's the Gilgamesh who returns to Uruk different from the Gilgamesh we see at the start of the poem that's very interesting and not very much explored it seems that he must be different because it's the end of the poem but the end of the poem has been thought unsatisfactory by some people and indeed they have tried to add other bits of other poems to it to have it Gilgamesh dying at the end but in the poem itself he doesn't die he simply returns home and then he tells his companion to go up onto the wall and look at the city but a close reading of the very beginning tells us I think what's going on because his epic career is described there in a few lines and the words that relate to his homecoming have no action in them before he's all action this process involved he's doing things when he gets home everything stops all the verbs are in what we call the stated form that described in action as if when he got to the end of his journey which you might think it's the end of a human life he stops doing anything he and he doesn't do anybody anymore he's like Pierre Bezukhov in war and peace he suddenly finds contentment in actually observing life and not doing anything himself is that regarded as an improvement those that regard as a step up his other regard as an ascension to wisdom and I think perhaps it might be and certainly there are many many people who think that the Epic of Gilgamesh has a spiritual side to it and does give lessons for attaining wisdom front Reynolds what happened to the when it was rediscovered in let's say 1853 what I'm doing since has been added to with more discoveries has it been can you give us more information yes I mean since the the first discoveries of cuneiform tablets in the 19th century as Andrew is indicated we're basically engaged as a serial to some one of the world's greatest jigsaw puzzles so more tablets are coming up all the time that increase our evidence often attesting to early versions of the story and for instance material from auger it and from other sites in modern-day Syria I'm also a tablet which was in the news quite recently that came into the museum and Sulaymaniyah that gave us a lot of new information about the cedar forests so the story certainly isn't over and let's hope those gaps in the story are going to keep shrinking margin what would you say is the special appeal of gilgamesh these days well to somebody who does it serially it's an incredibly exciting intellectual adventure as Fran was saying new finds new words new meanings new patterns new grammatical rules asuri ology is an expanding field which is trem tremendous if you're outside history ology then Gilgamesh has something for everyone you talk to people who specialize in denturri and they say den tastes so great because you can never get to the bottom you can always reread him talk to people who study Thucydides and they say exactly the same and I think we can say the same about Gilgamesh you know you have got everything you've got sex you've got the gods you've got loss you've got getting old you've got youthful adventure you've got the monster what isn't too like I would say that this is the one work of ancient Near Eastern literature that we can engage with as individuals this is this is something this is a hero who is very human he's always getting it wrong he's always doing wrong his his his career ends in failure and we're all like that we all have to come to terms with with with that mortality and that failure within us and under the trigger is often as with Gilgamesh the death of someone extremely close your translation has been hugely and widely admired and reads so fluently and it was it hard to know but Grey's once said if I'm simple to read because it's hard to write are you in that position I remember getting the proofs from penguin and I wanted it to read better as a poem so I read it out loud to myself on a hotel balcony in Baghdad and I think that helped a lot content better now thank you Andrew George Francis Reynolds and Martin were again next week we'll be discussing the fighting tomorrow by Turner painted in 1839 thank you for listening and the inner time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his I think people might like to hear about timing Gilgamesh and how difficult it is to know how long things last so if you actually with a poem like Bill wolf if you actually sit down and read it start to finish you can tot up there are so many days here and so many days there I dunno the whole thing lasts a week with Gilgamesh I think we have absolutely no idea you know there are a few days mentioned here a few days mentioned over there but there's the whole thing lasts in theory it could last a month or it could last a century it was last a thousand years there are all sorts of ways you can tie this in inverted commas scare quotes the Mesopotamian mind people in the ancient Near East in no how old they were they didn't normally have to apply for jobs in the same way we do so age was a much less of a factor and so it wasn't something they were interested in and so they're probably less interested in measuring time in works of literature so that's that's something that I find interesting I think - there's a there's more to be had out of exploring the business of immortality in in Gilgamesh because you mentioned you asked the question is there another story in ancient Mesopotamia where someone is in quest of immortal life and I don't think there is the question that the poet wants us to ask is actually his immortality worth having the poet tells us about the gods had the gods live forever but humans don't and it explores all sorts of it seems to do with human life what is the difference between men and gods between men and animals between civilized men and uncivilized men between Babylonians and foreigners and one thing it is also explores that it doesn't seem to be very much touched on is would it be good to live forever but if you look at the circumstances in which the flood hero is placed after he's made him immortal by the gods having survived the flood he lives in against a landscape that is not described it's a blank sheet and he lives there forever with his wife they have no company the poet doesn't say but he asked this question between the lines isn't this an extremely lonely place to be in mortality and I think if we think about the problem of you tality when people say oh I'd like to live forever in fact and it's been explored in other literature's living forever is probably hell on earth would you or would you like to turn into Brandon I think what are the interesting things in Gilgamesh is the fact of course that it's in this very polytheistic society so we have all these different gods occupying different roles and we have the interaction between them and I think that's something that's very interesting and for example we can see how Gilgamesh himself of course has this semi divine nature his mother is a goddess she gets the Sun God to protect him we have the encounter with Ishtar with aggression and then the wonderful interplay between the different deities in the flood story where Enlil wants to wipe out the human race but the god heir who Martin was talking about he was a very tricky God and often the god of sorts of cunning solutions manages to to let the flood hero know that this is going to happen to build the ark and then the whole business after the flood or the reconciliation of gods and men you know somehow life has to go on after the flood so endles very angry he didn't want survivors but a.m. and just to reconcile them so I think I think that's another interesting aspect of this epic is is that it's in such a polytheistic world yeah and one has to think of the gods not only as sort of superhuman personalities but there are also forces of nature so you can see that when mankind defends against the gods actually mankind is offending against nature you find that in the cedar forest as we've discussed but also in the flood story you have the same idea coming that that somehow the expansion of human numbers is such that the gods are disturbed it's a kind of way of saying that too many people overpopulation burdens over burdens the earth and the earth will do something about it there's the kind of early notion of Gaia theory here that the earth will respond as a self-regulating mechanism and get rid of the plague in Gilgamesh of course it's the gods who respond to the overpopulation of mankind in the flood story and try to wipe mankind out so embedded there is the idea of of a view of ecology or the environment in which human beings do not as in the Bible have dominion over the earth but they're actually part of a world which is very carefully balanced and there are opportunities for them to endanger this balance by cutting down the cedar forests by growing too fast in numbers which i think is a very sophisticated and notion and anticipates modern ideas about humans on on the planet - there are more than 700 programs to download and listen to for free from the in our time website where you'll also find a reading list for this episode you

Channel: BBC Podcasts

Views: 4,850

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: gilgamesh, epic of gilgamesh (book), ancient, sumer, sumerian, gilgamesh (person or being in fiction), mesopotamia, enkidu, humbaba, fiction (literary genre), alien, epic of gilgamesh (poem), book review, book report, space, cliffsnotes (brand), sparknotes (website), literature (media genre), literature review (literature subject), literary criticism (field of study), analysis (quotation subject), wisecrack, ufo, the epic of gilgamesh

Id: SFo140uk5Hc

Length: 48min 3sec (2883 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 06 2018